A new employability award for third-year STEM students, worth €2,500, as well as a €192,000 scholarship for postgraduate students, will launch in September.
The new Trinity-Intel Talent Award, developed as a partnership between Intel and Trinity, was approved at a meeting of College Board in June, and is open to 50 third-year students, currently studying in the schools of physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, computer science and statistics.
At the meeting of Board, Provost Patrick Prendergast praised the new initiative as “the first time that industry will be directly involved in the provision of undergraduate education in the university”. Last September, a memorandum of understanding was signed between Trinity and Intel, with the aim of improving the connection between the company and Trinity students and researchers.
Speaking to The University Times, the Director of the Careers Advisory Service, Sean Gannon, described how the Trinity-Intel Talent Award would act as a “pipeline for talented graduates who are moving into the electronics industry and specifically into Intel”.
The award will require students to complete four hours of workshops on job searching and reflective learning, provided by the Careers Advisory Service in conjunction with Student Learning and Development. Students will also have to undertake 12 hours of workshops delivered by Intel and submit either two 500-word pieces reflecting on themselves or alternatively one reflective piece alongside a three-minute video.
Co-curricular activities will also be used to assess students. Gannon, referencing the importance of “experiential learning”, said: “It could be part-time work, it could be student union representation, it could be lots of different things.”
All students completing the award will receive a certificate, while the six most successful applicants will receive an iPad. Each of these six will deliver a presentation and go through an interview process. Two winners, one male and one female, will receive the €2,500 prize.
Gannon explained that “the award essentially looks at students getting some training, provided by Intel, but applicable to other domains as well”.
“These students will now pick up pieces of experience from different environments”, he said.
The award was developed through consultation between the Careers Advisory Service and STEM graduates, who met with Gannon and the Academic Secretary, Patricia Callaghan.
“One of the ideas that we came up with was this notion of a an employment award”, Gannon said. The application system will be reviewed in its second year and plans to allocate places in the project randomly if too many students apply.
Scholarships for master’s degrees, to the value of €192,000, will be spread across four years. Gannon described it as “a really great development”. If the project is successful with Intel, it is hoped that the model may be replicated with other companies. “We would like to roll it out with different companies, actually looking at different skills and different corporate sponsors”, Gannon said.
Gannon sees the new awards as part of the development of the aims of the Trinity Education Project. One of the foundations of the project is the development of four graduate attributes: to think independently, to act responsibly, to develop continuously and to communicate effectively.
“When we were talking about this, we were talking about it in the context of the graduate attributes, and graduate attributes can remain simply as a set of words or you can have them as things which are living, which people experience, develop over the course of their years here in college”, Gannon said.
